Maggie’s New Media Blog

On September 15, 2005, a female student “Chen Yi” in Southwest University post an article “Sell myself to rescue my mother” in Tianya community with an anonymous ID, to seek for fund-raising to save her mother suffering from serious illness. From large-scale donation to insider disclosure, in less than a moth’s time, the incident was known as top social news, CCTV, Phoenix TV, Southern Weekly, as well as numerous local media carried out follow-up reports. After then, Tianya also consolidated its leading position of online communities in mainland China.

However, since that accident, people began to consider the social influence of Tianya. Actually, the controversy between Tianya, these online communities and traditional news organizations have never stopped in mainland China.

The internet is developing from web 1.0 one-way message to more personalized and interactive web 2.0 (Web 1.0 & Web 2.0). In the process, online community gradually became the focus of information and technology innovation. Actually, the development of the online community has brought a lot of inspiration for the new information gathering channels on the internet. Compared with the traditional media, online community, as a communication platform for lots of ordinary internet users, represents the potential influence of grass-roots cultural in China.

According to China Online Social Network Research Report 2007, conducted by Comsenz and Iresearch. There are 45.3% online community in China built in 2007, almost as twice as many compared with last year. In china, there are about 5 million readers in these famous online communities, such as Tianya and MOP, however, only 500 are the power users, who will take charge of publishing the news and upload the videos. Although the quantity is not so much, they are the main force to decide the quality of information and guarantee enough news recourses in the community. Besides, about 50,000 active users supply the comments and reactions everyday. And the others are about 3 million readers wandering among different website to search the information they need. Therefore, how to motivate the power users and how to attract more new readers become the key to develop as an good online community. Especially, nowadays, the increasing threaten come from the new communication system, such as Blog and Face book, and the traditional Web 1.0 websites successfully transform to Web 2.0 multimedia era, such as Sina and Sohu. To find its unique position in the internet, the online community have to learn from others’ strong points to offset its weakness.

Based on the Iresearch 2007 report statistics, the most important function of online community is a exchange platform for people share information with common interests. It is just the advantages for online community, which could get together groups of users with special interests, at the same time, it could easily enlarge its influence the other potential users in this particular group. Therefore, people’s recommendation has became the most significant extending method for online community in the internet.

However, only recommendation is not enough. Compared with the traditional media, regarding the search engine system, online community is still in a passive position. Take the “Chen Yi” as an example, I type it into google search, the first items still come from the traditional websites, such as Sina and Sohu, however, Tianya, as the recourse of “Chen Yi” story, is only listed in the following pages. Therefore, for large numbers of people, who used to gather information from search engine, it is very hard for online community to motivate them as the potential users and readers.

Over the past two years, because of the unclear classification and mixed contents in the online community, amount of valuable authorships and articles were covered among miscellaneous information. Therefore, it is pretty difficult to reflect the originality and innovative of online community. How to amend the outlook to better guide the new readers, how to improve the functions to better serve the power users, how to keep the valuable recourses of unofficial news in the society, all of these factors are very important for online community’s development and improvement.

There is a slogan in Tianya community’s homepage, “Global Chinese Online Home”. Chen Yi ’s story has passed two years, people are gradually changing their focus to other new-born websites and technologies.  Tianya must change in the future, however, whether the improved edition of Tianya be qualified for “Global Chinese Online Home”, we will wait and see.